BY ANDREW MEIER
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANTHONY SUAU
When Viktor Yushchenko rises each
dawn to begin the longest days of
his life, he stares hard in the mirror.
"The president doesn't recognize
himself," an aide in his inner circle
confides. "For him, it's impossible
to square the face in the glass with
the man inside." For millions of his
compatriots, however, Yushchenko's
face-bloated, pockmarked, and
deeply discolored-is a fitting sym
bol of their long-suffering land,
scarred by the past yet surviving
against all odds.
For years Yushchenko bided his
time. Throughout the dark era of
former President Leonid Kuchma,
Ukraine, a nation of 46 million in
a land larger than France, devolved
into a fiefdom of regional clans and
robber baron oligarchs. Reformers
mounted feeble assaults on the halls
of power, but the country was held
captive by a criminal regime atop a
foundering post-Soviet state. For
Ukrainians who yearn to escape
Russia's shadow and join the rest of
Europe and the West, Yushchenko
stood as the last great hope.
Then, almost on cue, came Yush
chenko's brush with death. During
the tense days leading up to the
2004 presidential election, then can
didate Yushchenko fell gravely ill
and had to be spirited out of the
country for emergency treatment.
Austrian doctors discovered the
cause of his near-fatal sickness:
dioxin poisoning. Yushchenko sur
vived, but with a disfigured face that
fueled outrage at the old regime,
believed by many to have ordered
Yushchenko's assassination. Instead
of killing him, however, his rivals
became unwitting handmaidens of
his revolution.
A declaration echoed across
Ukraine in the wake ofYushchenko's
ascent: Ya stoyav na Maidani!It
means "I stood on the Maidan,"
Independence Square in the heart
of Kyiv. It also means, I was there,
I stood up for freedom, I have a
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